


Chaperone

by Cameron_McKell



Series: Upon Further Review [43]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Tron (Movies), Tron - All Media Types, Tron: Legacy (2010)
Genre: Birthday Presents, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Gen, Not Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant, Shopping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-22
Updated: 2016-12-22
Packaged: 2018-09-11 04:18:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8953414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cameron_McKell/pseuds/Cameron_McKell
Summary: (Originally written for ikiracake on Tumblr, now archived on the AO3.)
Bruce should have stayed in bed.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was written after Captain America: The Winter Soldier and before Avengers: Age of Ultron.

“Why does this feel like a _spectacularly_ bad idea?” Bruce asked the store at large, even going so far as glancing toward the ceiling.

“More like spectacular, full stop.” Clint was the only one who seemed to have heard his comment, and he was stuck in some sort of smugness limbo, secure in the knowledge that no matter how the day went, he wouldn’t be paying for any of it.

“I certainly _feel_ like a spectacle,” Sam tossed in his two cents as he walked over, arms laden with a full complement of plush Avengers figures. One of the feathery-soft wings on Plush Thor’s helmet kept brushing under his nose lightly, causing it to twitch spasmodically.

Bruce gave him ten, maybe twenty minutes before he either dropped half of them, or sneezed all over Plush Thor.

“You get used to it,” Rhodey replied without even looking up from the racks of CDs he was flipping through. He pulled one out seemingly at random, and handed it over to Tron at the sampling station. It was still kind of surreal to see a computer program with giant headphones on his head, but he handled the scanning and touchscreen interface like a pro.

“That was _so_ far away from reassuring,” Sam grumbled, then shuffled to the side so Clint could swagger over to the video game demos, where the other Sam had snagged one of two controllers for the latest up-and-coming racing game.

That right there, Bruce decided, was going to be what inevitably got them kicked out of the store.

Or most of them, anyway; Steve, Quorra, and Bucky were off in the book section and actually behaving, so they’d probably be spared.

“Any of that close to what you were thinking?” Rhodey asked after a while, and Bruce turned his attention back to the trio around him.

“They are similar, but incomplete,” Tron replied with a small frown, but pulled the headphones off with a little shrug. “Users lack the necessary outputs for a full approximation, however.”

“Man, if you’re so determined to give Nat music like in the ‘old country’, just go back home and get her some,” Sam huffed, then pulled faces as he tried to hold in a sneeze. Tron looked thoughtful at the suggestion, and Rhodey threw his hands up in the air in exasperation at his wasted time and stomped off halfway down the aisle.

“That’s a good suggestion,” Tron eventually announced, and Bruce was about to walk over to the video games to stop a pair of grown men from shoving each other while racing down a street that looked remarkably similar to one Bruce had commuted along while working at an old factory job while on the run. He stopped, though, when Tron continued. “Or perhaps Natasha would prefer grenades for her birthday?”

Suddenly Rhodey was back, and clapping an arm around Tron’s shoulders. “You know who _really_ would like some of your special program shock grenades for their birthday? Me. Give Nat the music.”

Sam laughed at the pair of them, and started a rather unfortunate chain reaction when he practically inhaled Plush Thor’s helmet wing, so Bruce ducked down another aisle.

He didn’t want to get sneezed on, so sue him.

A trio of powerful 'achoos’ later, he peeked back around the aisle to see Sam standing with a plush blast radius all around him, while Rhodey similarly peeked around an unruffled Tron at the mess.

Apparently he hadn’t wanted to get sneezed on, either.

“I’ll go get you a basket or something,” Bruce volunteered while the other two got roped into cleaning up the mess with Sam.

By the time he got back, the budding Avengers Book Club had joined up with the trio in the music section, each of whom had about three plush Avengers in hand.

Rhodey was holding Plush Thor as if it were biological waste, and gratefully dumped it, and the rest of his armload into the cart as soon as it came to a stop.

“I didn’t know that Jules Vern wrote so _many_ books,” Quorra enthused as she also emptied her armful of books into the cart. “I know we were shopping for Natasha – and I did – but –”

Any reassurances they could have made were interrupted by the sound of a loud crash in the general vicinity of the video game department.

Bruce was maybe a little scared to look over, but like a car accident, he just couldn’t _not_ look.

Well, it was… definitely _spectacular_.


End file.
